The recent announcement that Google will digitize the holdings of
several major libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and
academe. Google presented this digital repository as a first step
towards a long-dreamed-of universal library, but skeptics were quick to
raise a number of concerns about the potential for copyright
infringement and unanticipated effects on the business of research and
publishing.

Jean-Noël
Jeanneney, president of France's Bibliothèque Nationale, here takes aim
at what he sees as a far more troubling aspect of Google's Library
Project: its potential to misrepresent—and even damage—the world’s
cultural heritage. In this impassioned work, Jeanneney argues that
Google's unsystematic digitization of books from a few partner
libraries and its reliance on works written mostly in
English constitute acts of selection that can only extend the dominance
of American culture abroad. This danger is made evident by a Google
book search the author discusses here—one run on Hugo, Cervantes,
Dante, and Goethe that resulted in just one non-English
edition, and a German translation of Hugo at that. An archive that can
so easily slight the masters of European literature—and whose
development is driven by commercial interests—cannot provide the
foundation for a universal library.

As a leading librarian,
Jeanneney remains enthusiastic about the archival potential of the Web.
But he argues that the short-term thinking characterized by Google's
digital repository must be countered by long-term planning on the part
of cultural and governmental institutions worldwide—a serious effort to
create a truly comprehensive library, one based on the politics of
inclusion and multiculturalism.